XI
"Samuel." CJ smiled at him tiredly as he entered. "Tell me you've solved the mystery of our watch-deprived ambassador?"
"Not yet, but I've been conducting an in-depth investigation," he said brightly. She narrowed her eyes.
"Should I be worried?"
"I didn't go through his garbage or anything," he shrugged.
"Then what, exactly, did your in-depth investigation entail?"
He looked slightly sheepish. "Well, I... asked Steve."
CJ smiled and shook her head. "Okay. And what did Steve say?"
"Ah, well," he smiled. "He happened to notice that the ambassador spent most of the evening in the company of one of the female guests."
She straightened up; at last, they might be getting somewhere. "Which guest?"
Sam's shoulders drooped slightly. "I don't know."
"Your investigative abilities wow me," CJ sighed.
"Steve said she was a blonde girl in a green dress, with-" he gestured vaguely in the direction of his shoulders- "some form of decoration or other that our mutual knowledge of fashion design and mime artistry wasn't sufficient to get across."
"Melanie Timberland," CJ instantly supplied. Sam blinked at her in surprise.
"You got that just from the-?" He made the gesture again.
"Sam, I'm a woman. I am, for reasons not quite understandable, every time I enter a room required to scope out the rest of the people in it and make sure nobody else is wearing the same dress I am."
"Wow."
"Yeah."
"Next time there's a dinner party I don't want to go to, I'm gonna try that," he mused. "I'm gonna walk in the door, say 'Oh my God! That guy's wearing a black tux too! I can't go in there,' and walk out again."
"Yeah?"
"Couldn't hurt."
"I don't think that would wash."
He nodded slowly. "What if I saw a guy with the same cufflinks?"
She lowered her brows at him. "Get out," she suggested.
"Okay." He headed towards the door. "I'll get hold of Timberland, see if she knows anything about the watch?"
"Thanks," she said gratefully.
CJ straightened out her paperwork, and picked up the briefing notes Carol had left her. She was only a few lines in when the phone rang.
"Hello? Oh, hi, Donna." She grimaced. "Please tell me this isn't about the Swedish Ambassador?" She sighed in relief. "Oh, thank you. Okay, what is it?"
She listened for a moment, then straightened up incredulously. "You got the president a what?"
Jed shook his head in weary disbelief. "And you're telling me this is true?"
"I spoke to Hoynes myself," Leo agreed sombrely, leaning forward against the chair-back his arms rested on. This wasn't the sort of conversation you sat down for.
The president looked down, his lips momentarily forming a curse or insult that he didn't speak aloud. "What was he thinking?" he wondered instead, when he raised his head.
"I'm not sure he was thinking anything," Leo told him.
Jed sighed. "Can we pull this out of the fire?"
"I don't know," he answered honestly, and Jed nodded solemnly.
"It's a question of where we can move next," Leo continued, after a momentary silence. "Bridges has kept quiet this long, where he's been able to use it to his advantage, but whether we can lean on him to-"
"Does Suzanne know?" the president suddenly interrupted. And of course he would be following that train of thought; not the politics, but the people behind them.
Leo winced. "Not about this particularly... but apparently she has a pretty good idea what her husband gets up to in his free time."
Jed shook his head in dismay. "It's a terrible thing, a marriage dying, Leo, a terrible thing," he said sadly.
A sharp remark almost escaped to remind him that Leo knew that better than he possibly could... but then again, maybe he didn't. He'd let his marriage wither and die by the wayside in pursuit of the things he deemed important, but Jed had never neglected his, leaning on it instead of away from it when times were at their darkest. So maybe for all Leo's bitter experience, Jed was the one who was wise in these matters.
"What's going to happen to him if this comes out?" he asked, glancing up at him.
Leo shrugged slightly. "Difficult to say. If he stands up and confesses of his own accord, and neither Selena nor Suzanne is making waves, there'll be pressure on him from all sides to resign, but he's not actually facing criminal charges, so..."
"What about Bridges?" the president wondered.
"He has considerable influence in the Senate... but that could be to our advantage," Leo noted. "If the truth about the blackmail comes out, that'll take Hoynes down for sure - but it'll take Bridges down with him, and he's gonna fall harder and faster." You could scrape together a case against the Vice President for endangering the business of government through conduct unbecoming, but the blackmail charges against Bridges would be a hundred times more airtight. The force of self-preservation could make Joe Bridges the Vice President's new best friend.
Jed nodded thoughtfully to himself, straightening out the sequence of events in his head. "So Hoynes publically admits to having had an affair, now six months in the past. Selena McGann keeps her mouth shut, Suzanne Hoynes either stands by her man or divorces him, and the word 'blackmail' is never so much as whispered. Assuming Hoynes doesn't resign... what happens next?"
Leo grimaced. "We might be able to keep him on as Vice President, but a presidential bid? The American public won't forget."
"They didn't forget I was censured, and they still re-elected me," Jed pointed out softly. Leo gave him a small smile.
"Yeah, they did... but John Hoynes isn't you."
The president sighed, plainly unwilling to relinquish the chance of forgiveness for Hoynes just yet, and left the subject alone. "I'll want to talk to him."
"Yeah." He'd anticipated that.
"Okay."
He left the Oval Office, but turned back to see the president walk across to the ball of fluff masquerading as a kitten on one of the chairs and lift it up into his arms. Despite himself, the sight made him smile, and for a while he walked the corridors with a slightly lighter heart.
Sam edged closer to Toby's office, from which angle he could see his boss's fierce scowl as he concentrated hard on whatever he was writing. It was his 'disturb on pain of death' expression, something that - thankfully - hadn't been seen very often in recent weeks.
He nudged Bonnie anxiously. "Has he been there all night?"
"No, but he was here before we all got here," she said, matching his level of concern.
"What's he working on?" he wondered with a frown.
Bonnie just shrugged.
A worrying thought struck. "It's not State of the Union fever, is it?" The early drafts were in, and he'd hoped for at least another week of grace before the rush to rewrite the whole thing from scratch set in.
She shook her head. "No pie."
"Ah."
Well, it couldn't be State of the Union fever if there was no pie. He steeled himself, and walked into the lion's den.
"Hey, Toby."
His boss's rapid-fire typing came to a staccato halt. "Yes?" he demanded pointedly.
"What are you working on?" he wondered. "I thought we were pretty much clear the rest of the week?"
"This is for Andy," he said brusquely. Sam smiled in disbelief.
"Toby, are you writing love letters on government time?" he smirked.
Toby gave him a look. "This was not, last time I checked, actually sixth grade. Therefore, it follows that this is not a love letter."
"Then what are you writing?" he enquired, not deterred.
"I'm making my case," he said shortly. Sam remained confused.
"Making your case...? Toby, are you-"
Ginger appeared with a quick knock on the doorframe and a nervous glance at Toby. "Sam?"
"Yeah?" He straightened up.
"Melanie Timberland's here."
"Okay. Thank you." His boss had gone back to pointedly ignoring him, so he followed her out. "She's waiting in the lobby?"
"Yeah."
As they crossed the bullpen, he jerked his thumb back in Toby's direction. "He's writing love letters in there," he confided, eyebrows raised.
Ginger blinked. "Okay, now I'm more scared than I was this morning."
"Tell me about it."
They split up and went their separate ways.